Quietly revealed in August, The Touryst from Shin’en Multimedia recently arrived on Nintendo Switch and quickly left a strong impression. With its voxelised design, smooth frame-rate and unique gameplay, it’s unlike anything the team has worked on to date – and I think it’s one of my favourite Switch releases of 2019. Beneath its stylised but relatively simplistic visual design lies one of the Switch’s most capable graphics engines – a game that basically never deviates from its target 60fps and never makes you wait more than a second. It’s fast, it’s beautiful and it’s worth checking out.
It’s the latest in a long line of technical showcases from Munich-based Shin’en Multimedia – ex-demo scene coders who’ve managed to extract phenomenal results from all Nintendo platforms, from Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance to Switch. Users of Nintendo’s latest machine may be familiar with Fast RMX – an updated version of Fast Racing Neo originally released for Wii U. Fast RMX offers a whole slew of modern effects and techniques at an unwavering 60 frames per second and despite being a launch title, it’s still gorgeous – and one of the best-looking games on Switch. The Touryst heads in a completely different direction, but it’s equally as impressive – if not more so.
So, what is the Touryst? At its core, this is an exploration-driven adventure game. It’s a game that has you traveling across various islands solving the mysteries below the surface. The concept is simple yet the execution is simply perfect. It’s never explicitly spelled out what you should do in each area but it’s so satisfying when everything clicks. Each island is a beautiful chunk with its own themes and concepts. Leysure Island is one of my favorites – it includes a range of shops to mess around with including a theatre, a music store selling songs from previous Shin’en games and an arcade with three original games.
At its core, all of this is driven by the team’s in-house engine. According to Shin’en’s Manfred Linzner, The Touryst uses a deferred renderer building on the work done for Fast RMX. In order to maintain a smooth frame-rate, the team has once again opted to use a dynamic resolution system. In docked mode, resolution can vary from a maximum of 1080p to slightly less than 50 per cent on both axes. Typically, outdoor areas average around 810p to around 900p while indoor areas stick closer to full 1080p in most cases. Portable mode uses the same technique, with a maximum resolution of 720p and 50 per cent of that on each axis for the lower bounds. It typically jumps between 612p and 720p in this mode.
The team has opted to avoid anti-aliasing as pixelated edges fit directly into the visual style. Because everything is presented as voxel shapes, hard edges wind up looking perfectly acceptable in this specific game. It’s clear that these choices were made as a result of the art direction. The engine is mostly deferred but certain effects are forward rendered – that was a choice made that allows for a range of optimisations and increased artistic freedom during development.